Aussie cricket team protecting its bowlers with wearables

Australia’s cricket team is the latest sporting franchise to adopt a wearable to check player performance levels. The news comes a month before the team’s series with Sri Lanka.

Designed by a sports scientist team at the Australian Catholic University (ACU), the wearable is able to track and analyse high speed bowls, providing insight into a bowler’s speed, performance, and fatigue.

Bowlers spend hours everyday practicing their throw, and a slight dip in performance might be the difference between 10 and 100 runs. Giving staff the ability to see changes in performance may allow them to schedule smarter practice regimes and work on deficiencies.

“Tagging individual balls with an intensity measure provides both immediate analysis such as identifying effort balls, or potentially a drop in performance due to fatigue, or longer term workload analysis,” said ACU sports scientist Dean McNamara, part of the wearable team.

Cricket borrowing from missile technology

ACU used submarine technology that guides missiles and spacecraft to make the wearable capable of tracking high speed bowls. Inside the wearable sits an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer — everything a wearable needs to precisely track movement.

Cricket, like most sports, does not allow wearables to be used during games. Considering matches sometimes last half a day, we can see why it may be unfair to have one team analyzing every single part of the game, while the other team lacks the resources.

Some of the more contemporary sports like NBA, MLB, and NFL are starting to adopt wearables, at least for practice games, though leagues seem emphatic that changes could give some teams unnecessary advances, both on and off the pitch.

Even rugby, another antique in the sporting world, is taking a stab at wearables, as a way to potentially lower the amount of casualties.

Related Posts

There’s no doubt about it––the Internet of Things (IoT) is shaping up to be the mother of all technology trends in 2016. There are endless statistics on how many devices are or will be coming online; just within the home, everything from doorbells to refrigerators, to light bulbs has become internet-enabled. As IoT devices infiltrate… Read more »

In 2015, Dimension Data became the official technology partner for the Tour de France, the world’s largest and most prestigious cycling race. In support of their goal to revolutionize the viewing experience of billions of cycling fans across the globe, Dimension Data needed to analyze thousands of data points per second, from nearly 200 riders, across… Read more »

The growth of Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly increasing the amount of data generated, and industry experts warn that the current river of unstructured data will soon turn into a flood. Alarmingly, a recent study highlighted concerns that most proposed approaches could lead to data management overload ineffective for the coming torrent of data. Enterprise… Read more »

The bicycle bell hasn’t seen much change since its introduction: you press it and it pings. Shoka Bell wants to change that, with its new self-titled bell that provides navigation and protects your bike. Shoka Bell comes in two parts, a metal interior that attaches to the bike and a vibrant exterior that handles all… Read more »

When you think about global leaders Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) manufacturing, a few regions come to mind. China, Europe, and the United States are certainly among them. But, government leaders from South Africa want to add a new region to the global conversation: Africa. South African Telecommunications and Postal Services Minister Dr Siyabonga Cwele recently attended… Read more »